WASHINGTON — Some of the conservative leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election rallied outside the Capitol on Wednesday to urge Congress to pass an “election integrity” bill to stop noncitizens from voting.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who leads the group, acknowledged that undocumented immigrants vote in elections. is already illegal under federal law. “Some have pointed out that it’s already a crime for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and that’s true,” Johnson said.
But he claimed he knew “intuitively” that non-citizens voted, although he couldn’t estimate how many people there were. Numerous studies there is is displayed is non-citizen voting extremely rare in federal elections.
“I mean, the answer is no answer,” Johnson said. “That’s the problem. … We all intuitively know that a lot of illegals vote in federal elections. But that’s not something that’s easy to prove. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do just that. If someone tries to do that, it will be illegal in the states.”
Johnson, a constitutional lawyer and close ally of Donald Trump, played a role A key role in Trump’s cancellation of the 2020 election. led Amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicanssupported a Texas court seeking to invalidate the results of the 2020 election in four key states won by President Joe Biden.
Johnson was joined Wednesday by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, two lawmakers whose text messages were sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. prominently displayed In the January 6 committee investigation into the attack.
Others on hand included a who’s who of MAGA conservatives. Among them were Stephen Miller, Trump’s former White House senior adviser; Jenny Beth Martin co-founded the Tea Party Patriots outside the Capitol with the bull January 6, 2021; and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell Talk to Trump in January 2021 when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough 11,000 votes to overturn the state’s election results.
Two other former Trump administration officials, Hogan Gidley and Ken Cuccinelli, also spoke on Wednesday.
Asked at a press conference whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election, Johnson replied: “We’re talking about the 2024 election today.”
But he continued: “No one can go back and repeat what happened in 2020. We know that there are ballots collected and mailed ballots. It was a covid election. There was all sorts of deregulation caused by the pandemic, where states haphazardly put together new laws and opened up systems, causing all kinds of confusion, chaos, and even unrest that continues to this day.
(“Ballot collection” refers to a third party, such as a family member, collecting return ballots. Conservatives condemned the practice, but The RNC accepts it in the 2024 election “when lawful.”)
Miller, who has built a reputation as an anti-immigration activist in Washington, tried to troll the media and Democrats on Jan. 6, 2021, while standing on the steps of the House of Representatives, where Trump supporters climbed and pushed past police officers.
“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said. He opposed “wide-opening the border and obstructing any attempt to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections.”
Despite the lack of evidence of noncitizen voting, Miller repeated unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that Democrats imported voters to help re-elect Biden.
Johnson first unveiled the legislative framework last month while standing next to Trump During a visit to the Mar-a-Lago resort. The Protecting American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would make it harder for people to register to vote by requiring proof of citizenship. Voting rights advocates say that could include a U.S. passport, a photo showing a person was born in the U.S. or a birth certificate — documents millions of Americans don’t have access to.
When NBC News pointed out that the legislation would go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed into law by Biden, the speaker backtracked.
“This is not a texting bill. This is one of the most fundamental … most important pieces of legislation to be introduced in our lifetime in our congressional careers. This is the essence of what a constitutional republic means. “If people can’t trust the integrity of this system, then we don’t have anything,” Johnson said.
“And so we’re going to take it out of the House and send it to the Senate and let Chuck Schumer decide whether he’s okay with the idea,” Johnson said. “We don’t. for messaging purposes.”